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The Musical Teaching of John Curwen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

H. Watkins Shaw
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Extract

It was in 1842 that John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister aged 26, began his life's work as one of the most notable pioneers of popular musical education. For fully fifty years his was the dominant single influence on music in the state schools of England, Scotland and Wales, and hence upon the large mass of the community. Even today, at the end of a period of more than twenty-five years during which the trend of musical education has tended to discredit his teaching, his figure still broods over the teaching of vocal music, and quantities of school songs continue to be published with the Tonic Sol-fa ‘interpreting’ notation along with the standard Staff notation. Nevertheless, except in Scotland, the true essentials of his teaching are no longer an effective force—a fact which makes possible an attempt at an analytical re-statement of his principles today in a less controversial atmosphere than formerly. Curwen's own writings will be examined in an effort to get behind the numerous adaptations, modifications and dilutions which his method underwent before being discredited.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 77 , 1950 , pp. 17 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1950

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References

1 The Teacher's Manual of the Tonic Sol-fa Method.Google Scholar

2 The Teacher's Manual, p. 336.Google Scholar

3 Grammar of Vocal Music.Google Scholar

4 The Teacher's Manual, p. 294.Google Scholar

5 The Tonic Sol-fa method does not pass over the study of intervals, but postpones it to a later stage. On the other hand, it does not encourage the singing of any but the most difficult intervals by an effort to calculate distance.Google Scholar

6 The effect of the sharpened fourth of the major scale is to establish the feeling of a leading note into the dominant key: in a simple context, such a series as I r m fe would ‘expect’ to be followed by s. On the other hand, the tendency of the inflected sixth of the minor series is to rise a whole tone to make a smooth melodic approach to se; the syllable ba is so taught as to embody that tendency, so that the series l r m ba would ‘expect’ to be followed by se.Google Scholar

7 The Staff Notation: A Practical Introduction on the Tonic Sol-fa Method of Teaching Music, 1872.Google Scholar